Most people don't think about the effect that dreaming has on their waking lives, but dreams help your imagination grow, help you develop what's in your psyche, allow you to tap into your inner wisdom, and drive you to increase real life success.
Dreams really are a doorway to greater self-awareness, knowledge, and success. Sounds great, right? But how do you open and walk through that door?
There is an actual pathway that can take you from wishful thinking about dreams to a reliable dream habit. Just follow these steps:
Intend to remember a dream.
You can prepare your awareness to be receptive. Decide what kind of dream experiences you want to have. Do you want to visit an exotic place or connect with a relative who has died? Do you want to heal psychological or physical wounds? Pick something specific or ask for general guidance; then, program your subconscious mind before sleep. For example, "I will remember my most important dream in the morning." Or, "Bring me an insight concerning which job offer to accept."
Sleep well; wake up well.
If you're too stressed or wake often during the night, your dream cycles will be disturbed. Eating foods like turkey, milk, bananas, or cheese before bed can have a sedating effect.
When you wake in the morning, take a few moments to gently rise from the depths of sleep to slowly come back to daily reality so that you can maintain a connection with your dreams. Maintain the subtle feelings and sensations in your body before your mind kicks into gear.
Recognize your dream activity.
It's important to develop a habit of turning your attention immediately to your dreams as you wake up. Let your first thoughts of the day be: "What have I just been doing?" Dreams come in various forms: a cinematic saga, a fragment, a single symbol or word, or even a highlighted experience later in the day after you wake. Speak in present tense about dreams: "I'm swinging on a rope, jumping from tree to tree. I sense I might fall." Speaking to yourself in the past tense can distance you from the dream.
Record your dream.
Once you've learned to preserve your live connection with your dreams, you must do something to make the dreams real and physical to your body. This way, your body, which is connected with your subconscious mind, knows you meant what you said the night before when you asked to remember your experiences, and it will cooperate. Tell someone right away, describe the dream into a recorder, or write it in your dream diary.
Decode the message.
Making sense of your dream is perhaps the most daunting step, but also the most fun. This is where you'll ask yourself: "How is this dream image, dream choice, dream action, or dream emotion part of a process I'm going through right now in my waking life? How are the dream elements part of a life lesson I'm learning?" Bringing the subliminal into conscious awareness validates the process.
You can learn more about what meaning specific dreams and symbols hold by looking at the following graphic.
Follow through.
If your dream contains guidance, a warning, an answer to a problem, or an inspiring image, use the information. Follow through on what you receive because this is why you dreamed the dream in the first place. Using dreamtime insights in daily life reinforces your intention to connect the two halves of your experience, completes the dream cycle, and frees you to move into a new phase of exploration and creativity.
Do it all again.
When establishing a reliable dream habit, your subconscious mind will engage fully and bring you dreams consistently after you repeat the process at least three times. Some people say seven times just to be sure.
Dreams deliver messages from your subconscious and superconscious mind. Use these steps to tap into your personal messages in order to discover (and remember) what your body is trying to tell you.
Click here for the full PDF of 8 Common (and Not So Common) Dreams Decoded.